


Giving and Taking

by Elendiliel



Series: Lightning Strikes [28]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Guerrilla Warfare, Jedi as Found Family (Star Wars), Planet Onderon (Star Wars), Post-Order 66 (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-03
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:00:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29826012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendiliel/pseuds/Elendiliel
Summary: Jedi Knight and freedom fighter Helli Abbasa has long since got out of the habit of marking her birthday, but her new family have plans to change that. Even if, now that they're renegades and part of a rebellion against the Empire, it's still mostly another day on the job. That supply convoy isn't going to redistribute itself.
Series: Lightning Strikes [28]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087898





	Giving and Taking

“Okeyday, now what did you want to show me?” Jedi Knight turned freedom fighter Helli Abbasa looked around the boxroom one of her apprentices, Zatt, had commandeered as a workroom. It was in its usual state of vaguely ordered chaos. Presumably Zatt knew exactly what was where, but anyone else would have struggled even to find the light switch.

“This.” Zatt held out what, to most people, would have looked like just a long, straight piece of wood with an engraved band of metal around the central third and a leather strap attached near the ends. But not to a daughter of Alba. Helli had left her birth-world for the Jedi Temple on Coruscant at the age of seven, but she knew a combat staff when she saw one. And was pretty sure she remembered how to use it. She took this one from Zatt, muscle-memory flowing into consciousness, and tested it out. It balanced perfectly in her hands, its length and weight exactly matched to hers. She took a closer look at the markings on the metal section (a thin layer of durasteel over the wood, she thought) and saw that they echoed the ones on her lightsabre, which she could no longer use openly. “It’s beautiful. And beautifully made.”

“That’s not the good bit.” Zatt indicated a pair of discreet hook-and-eye fastenings that, when undone, allowed half the durasteel portion to swing open at a barely visible hinge and reveal a gap in the wood just big enough for her sabre hilt. Acting half from deduction, half on instinct, Helli withdrew said hilt from its holder on her belt and placed it in the gap before closing the panel again. The same mix of logic and intuition led her fingers to a switch and a dial, almost invisible at one end of the metal band. When she pressed the switch, so like her sabre’s control, a slight shimmer in the air indicated the presence of a forcefield all around the staff. Zatt had created the perfect weapon and tool for an undercover Jedi. It had most of the important functionalities of a lightsabre, but wouldn’t get her executed. “Oh, brilliant. _Thank you._ ” She packed the words full of gratitude and sincerity, meaning them with all her heart.

“You’re welcome. Happy birthday, master.” The last word was muffled as Helli pulled her Nautolan padawan into a close embrace. Only then did she remember that she _had_ turned twenty-two that day. Her previous three birthdays had passed unmarked as the war swept all before it, and she hadn’t wanted to mention it to her brothers. Anything that reminded them of the difference between clone and natural-born was best avoided. Nor had she told her apprentices. “How did you know?”

“Fives brought it up a few weeks ago. He said Torrent found it out.” That made sense. Torrent, their man on the inside, would have access – officially or otherwise – to the requisite files, and she wouldn’t put it past him to arrange something like this for his _numa_. “The staff was Petro’s idea. Gungi suggested using brylark wood, like his sabre, and Katooni got Hondo to get hold of some. Echo and I designed the forcefield generator, Spark and Ganodi helped build it, Fives and Gungi did the carving and metalwork and Byph decorated it. It’s from all of us.”

“If things could be _more_ perfect, this would be. Remind me to thank all the others properly.”

“I will, if it’s necessary. I’ve started designing something similar for each of us as well.” He held out the datapad he used for his work. Helli took it and started flicking through the technical diagrams. The one for Petro resembled a bo-rifle, as used by the High Honour Guard of Lasan, but was distinctive enough not to cause offence to any Lasats he might meet. Katooni’s was an extendable electrostaff, Zatt’s own doubled as a multi-tool, Ganodi had chosen a shielded quarterstaff, like Helli’s but with different proportions, Gungi’s was a bowcaster – strangely appropriate, somehow – and Byph’s looked like a Mandalorian-style personal shield generator. Zatt had done a very good job, but there was a difference between blueprints and reality. Rather a critical one.

“Where were you planning to find the materials for all of these?”

Zatt looked awkward. “I don’t know. Getting hold of the components for your staff was tricky enough. I don’t think we can rely on Hondo to that extent, and we can’t exactly buy them openly.”

“A conundrum it is. But one that’ll have to wait. We were meant to be in the conference room five minutes ago. Coming?” He was. The strategy meeting was also late starting, thankfully, and the pre-meeting arguments were still in full swing when Zatt and Helli, staff hanging by its strap from her left shoulder, walked in. Helli let the disputants carry on for as long as her patience lasted, but as so often happened she eventually felt she had to get them on track. The cocktail of characters that was Onderon’s resistance against the Empire, herself included, was always a potentially explosive one. While she respected Saw Gerrera as both a person and a leader, he drove her not just up the wall but at least halfway across the ceiling, and she knew he felt the same about her. Lifelong discipline meeting unquenchable zeal – it was the old problem of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and it was anyone’s guess which would yield first.

The bone of contention turned out to be the relative importance of various targets. Gerrera, as ever, wanted to create maximum impact, and had fastened on the city power grid yet again. King Dendup was arguing for causing inconvenience and perhaps embarrassment to the Imperial governor personally, and Fives thought another sweep of the Empire’s supply depot was in order. He had never fully trusted Hondo Ohnaka, the rebellion’s unofficial quartermaster, and was all for depriving the Imperial regime of anything that wasn’t absolutely essential for life. As Helli intruded on their awareness, Gerrera appealed to her to break the deadlock. “Master Abbasa, what do _you_ think?”

She didn’t waste her breath correcting him regarding her title. That was a battle she suspected she would never win, so shouldn’t start. “You know how I feel about the power grid. High risk to both attackers and civilians. Too high. If it were up to me, I’d focus on the supply depot. Take back what your taxes are paying for and you never see. And inconveniencing the governor wouldn’t be a bad move, as long as it’s done in such a way as not to invite repercussions. But this is your rebellion. Make your own decisions.”

“I think you can kill two birds with one stone there.” Echo had been going through a backlog of communications records. “There’s a large shipment coming in later today, of weapons for the army, materials and components for the factory they’re setting up outside the city and food, officially for the civilian population. But the governor just announced that rationing would have to get stricter to compensate for rebel activity. If we can redistribute that shipment to where it’s meant to go, we’ll be helping a lot of people _and_ making the governor look like a fool – or a liar.”

“Immaculate reasoning as always, Corporal.” King Dendup was the only one who used Echo’s rank. “It won’t hurt to keep arms out of the stormtroopers’ hands, either – or to delay the opening of the factory. I shudder to think what they will produce there, and under what conditions. And embarrassing that Imperial blockhead is seldom unwelcome to me. Gerrera, does that sound reasonable?”

“Perfectly, Your Majesty.” Echo had caught Gerrera’s interest at the mention of weapons. He had long since adopted Hondo’s policy “speak softly and drive a big tank”. “Echo, how detailed is your intel?”

The answer, as was usually the case with Echo, was “very”. Enough that they could predict the movement of every crate in the convoy. The bulk of the rebels would be split between arms and provisions, with a smaller team tasked with obtaining medical supplies. Byph, Fives and Helli combined their diplomatic gifts to persuade Gerrera that diverting a few containers of metals and electrical components wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. They were all thinking of Zatt’s plans for equipping his friends and himself as befitted Jedi in their situation, and this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Gerrera didn’t want to spare too many of his own people for what he clearly considered a low-priority target, so Zatt and Helli ended up being the whole team. That suited them. Lightning Squadron might be not so much a squad as a five-person gestalt at times, but neither they nor Helli’s padawans, whom the other rebels had started to nickname “Thunder Squadron”, worked quite as well with Gerrera’s guerrillas. An all-Jedi unit was less prone to ideological or strategic disputes. This particular two-being unit settled on a classic distraction-blindside attack plan, finding a place along the route between the spaceport where the crates would be unloaded and the half-built factory nearby that would be perfect for an ambush. According to Echo, the Imps had as low an opinion of the importance of this consignment as Gerrera, so there would be minimal guards – probably just two. Easy.

Zatt would be the distraction. He was shaping up well as a fighter, but Helli still had better reach and more weight, as well as nearly a decade of extra experience. And he had some specific ideas for how to handle this particular job, though he didn’t share them with his teacher, instead vanishing back into his workroom as soon as he could to test his hypotheses. Helli, knowing him as well as she did, didn’t probe. Zatt never argued ahead of his data. When he knew something for sure, he said so, and not before. Whatever he was planning, it would work.

Even so, she was mildly disconcerted when he still hadn’t told her his plan by the time they were in position. As Echo had predicted, there were only two guards, stormtroopers, complaining to one another in the way of low-ranking soldiers on dead-end duty all across the universe. They were steering a crate apiece, and others bobbed along behind on anti-grav. Presumably the unmanned crates were slaved to the ones in front somehow. Hel put that speculation to the back of her mind, waiting for Zatt’s diversion.

It wasn’t slow to come. Hel had her work cut out taking the grin off her face as a hover-ball floated across the convoy’s path, hotly pursued and quickly captured by its owner. Had Zatt taken inspiration from what he’d heard about Shaeeah Lawquane? Regardless of the source of his idea, it worked. The convoy stopped as the Nautolan boy, who still looked young for his age if one didn’t meet his eyes, apologised for the disruption. “Sorry, sir. It got away from me. The programming must be faulty.”

“I’ll say. This is a restricted area. Go back to your mother, and don’t let me catch you here again.”

“Easier said than done, I’m afraid.” Zatt’s ball flew out of his hands again and made for the guard who had just spoken, shooting upwards at the very last minute and changing course to strike one of the first pair of unmanned crates, knocking it into the one beside it and spilling the contents of both onto the ground.

“Oh, really…” The other guard sighed as he and his partner started to recover their cargo. Zatt made to help, but was shoved aside. “You’ve done enough damage today. Can’t have you making off with Imperial property, can we?”

As it happened, that was, of course, exactly what was intended. And Hel and Zatt weren’t the only ones, as the stormtroopers’ comms informed them (Spark, Echo and Zatt had long since hacked the Imp command frequencies, so Hel could eavesdrop on them quite easily) moments before she could make her move. “All units, the rebels are attacking the supply convoys. PI-314 and PI-159, stay at your posts. Report in at the first sign of suspicious activity. All other units not on essential duties, reinforce the nearest convoy immediately.”

 _Saw, you Chancellor-sized nuisance, your timing could hardly be worse,_ Hel thought. The troopers were looking at Zatt with fresh eyes. She realised too late that Nautolans were rare on Onderon. If anyone had spotted and reported him during the raid on the comms centre, things could be about to go very, very wrong.

“Hold on…” The first guard was beginning to put the pieces together. Hel couldn’t risk him going any further. Her new staff was already in her hands, and she had been halfway to the stormtroopers when the APB had come in. She crossed the remaining space in less than a heartbeat and let her long-ago training take over, striking each guard on the helmet with just enough force to keep them down until she and Zatt were clear, without causing lasting damage. Hours spent in combat simulators back on Alba and in the Temple had paid off at last. The two Jedi dragged the unconscious soldiers to the side of the road, leaving them in the recovery position, before restoring the scattered electrical components to their crates, rather more carefully than the troopers had.

In a matter of minutes, they were ready to go. The crates, however, weren’t. The lead pair refused to budge, and the others were, indeed, linked to them. Zatt had been ready for this.

“I thought as much. They can only be moved by someone with the right transmitter on the right frequency. Otherwise, the inertial dampers go into reverse and the harder you try to move them, the more they resist. The stormtroopers must have transmitters built into their armour.”

“Well, neither of us are going to fit into that lot.” Both soldiers were significantly taller than Hel, let alone Zatt. “I presume you have a solution?”

“Of course.” He unscrewed the two halves of his hover-ball, now quiescent, to reveal two small cylindrical devices, which he placed on the front pair of crates. “These should override the frequency lock, and any homing programme or alarm system they might have. And check for tracking devices. I made sure the other units have some of these as well. I just hope they remember to use them.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.” Hel started to push one of the leading crates. It didn’t just move far more easily than before; it floated away from her, in the direction she wanted. The rest followed. Zatt must have built his own homing programme into his gadgets.

“Spark gave me plenty of help, but it was the logical thing to do. The supply convoys are an obvious target, and the Empire was going to introduce countermeasures pretty quickly. They don’t have a great deal of imagination there, though.”

“Luckily for us. And it’s a good thing we have you, Echo and Spark, always one jump ahead.” They were strolling back into Iziz now, following their liberated cargo. “Do you think this lot includes everything you need for your projects?”

“It should do. I checked the inventory Echo found. I’ll get to work as soon as I can.”

“Excellent. Anything else, we can trade, sell or use elsewhere. I’m glad you’ve found a way for us to use our sabres, even in disguise. These last months, I’ve felt as though I’m fighting with a hand tied behind my back. But this,” she touched her staff, “feels so much like my sabre, I’m going to need some time in the training room to remind myself of the difference. It’s the best birthday present I could have asked for – which isn’t something I ever expected to say of a weapon.”

“It’s been a strange year for all of us. I didn’t expect to have a master like you, but I’m glad we do. You’re exactly the teacher we need.” Helli acknowledged the compliment with an arm around her padawan’s shoulders. It had been the oddest birthday she could remember, but quite possibly the best. She might have just stolen from the Empire, but she had also been given something that made her feel more like a full Jedi than she had in months. Life had taken a great deal from her in the previous year, but it had given her so much as well, and she was incredibly grateful for it.


End file.
